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Shumpei Fukuhara
the Paradox of George Orwells NineteenEighty-Four
The Past Inside Out:
0. Introduction
As the title Nineteen Eighty-Four suggests,
temporality is an important factor in the novel. Although
the novel is set in the future, it follows the struggle of
the main protagonist who looks for the past. In fact,
Winstons rebellion aims at the retrieval of the past
or history, which is inaccessible in the regime of Big
Brother. This hope of Winston is embodied by the glass
paperweight, which Winston buys at a junk shop. The
paperweight is a glass hemisphere which contains a
piece of coral, and what appeals to Winston is the fact
that the coral has been protected from the passage of
time for more than a hundred years. The image of the
past sheltered from the outer threat epitomizes Winstons
idealized view of former times. In contrast, the Party
monopolizes written documents and, as a result, controls
the past. Therefore, it can be said that the novel describes
the fght for the past. Focusing on the issue of the past,
this essay analyses why Winston persists in tracing the
past and what the eventual transformation of Winston
implies in terms of the fght for the past.
In order to investigate the points above, it is
necessary to examine the dichotomy of the inside and
the outside, which is one of the most salient motifs in the
novel. As the glass paperweight keeps the past intact,
Winston Smith looks for the residual past, which has
escaped the control of the Party, while the Party tries
to annihilate this distinction and rule the whole domain
of history. This dialectic of the inside and the outside
is rendered dynamic especially in the brainwashing of
Winston, where his former belief is converted. The
following sections investigate the issue of the past in
relation to this insideoutside dichotomy.
1. The deprivation of temporal foundation
Nineteen Eighty-Four narrates the resistance of
Winston Smith against the regime of Big Brother and
Winstons eventual arrest. Interestingly, among various
actions against the party, his frst step is to get a notebook
and keep a diary. This act might appear rather trivial,
but in fact it is the crucial moment. His decision to
keep a diary has a symbolic meaning, as a series of his
subsequent actions mostly aim to regain the past, which
is systemically controlled by the party.
Along with the panoptic surveillance system by
telescreen and a set of brainwashing techniques, the
control of history is an integral part of party rule. One
of the reasons why the party monopolizes history is that
the continual revision of the past allows the party to
legitimatize its reign. An important task of the Ministry
of Truth, where Winston works as a party member, is
to continually rewrite the past in favour of the party.
Whenever a contradiction arises between the partys
official statement and reality, the party modifies the
record of the statement, while distorting the reality
by brainwashing techniques such as doublethink. By
means of continual falsifcation, the party can insist that
it has always been correct; with historical documents
monopolized by the party, it is impossible to challenge
the party regarding the authenticity of the offcial history,
since there is no evidence of the forgery in the form of
hard material:
And when memory failed and written records were
falsified when that happened, the claim of the
Party to have improved the conditions of human life
had got to be accepted, because there did not exist,
and never again could exist, any standard against
which it could be tested (97).
As a result, history in the regime is always changing: All
history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and re-inscribed
exactly as often as was necessary (42). As is suggested
by the palimpsest metaphor, which will be discussed
in greater detail later, the manipulation of offcial history
renders the past amorphous and unreliable for Winston.
In addi t i on t o hi st orys rol e as a means of
legitimatization of the regime, the domination of the past
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brings the party another advantage: the uncertainty of
the temporal foundation makes the people susceptible to
brainwashing. As is argued in some narrative theories, a
narrative based on temporal sequences is essential for a
person to maintain his or her sense of identity, which can
be defned as a felt assurance of the continuance of the
self.

Therefore, if the past becomes amorphous through


the manipulation of the party, ones life story becomes
instable. In fact, Winston cannot remember his early
childhood; as a result, he is unsure of his own life history,
or who he is:
[H]e was struggling to think his way backward
into the dim period of his early childhood. It was
extraordinarily difficult. Beyond the late fifties
everything faded. When there were no external
records that you could refer to, even the outline of
your own life lost its sharpness (34).
Important in this passage is that Winstons lack of self-
knowledge leads to amorphousness of his life; he has
to acknowledge that the contour of his life is blurred.
In this respect, Winston is not alone. Using this same
manoeuvre, the party is able to transform individuals in
Oceania into amorphous masses that can be moulded
into a form the party likes. Moreover, in Winstons
case, his parents were likely to have been vaporized, or
secretly arrested, executed, and treated as if they had
never existed. With his parents vaporized, Winston was
in theory born from nobody, for his parents are non-
persons. Therefore, being nobodys child, Winston is
suffering from the loss of his origin. He is tormented by
this void, which he wants to fll by regaining the memory
of his childhood.
In addition, deprivation of temporal orientation is a
basic technique the party employs to brainwash a thought
criminal. After his arrest by the Thought Police, Winston
is brought to the Ministry of Love, where modern
technological torture awaits.

An important physical
characteristic of the Ministry of Love is that it deprives a
prisoner of the sense of time. The room where Winston
is detained is described as follows:
He was in a high-ceilinged windowless cell with
walls of glittering white porcelain. Concealed
lamps fooded it with cold light, and there was a low,
steady humming which he supposed had something
to do with the air supply (237).
In this completely artificial space, there is no natural
cycle of day and night, as Winston knew instinctively, the
lights would never be turned out (241). Consequently,
Winston repeatedly asks himself how long he has been
confined; he wonders that [i]t might be twenty-four
hours since he had eaten, it might be thirty-six (237).
Also, when he saw the extremely thin fgure of himself
in a mirror, he is horrifed to realize that he must have
been in this place longer than he had imagined (285).
After depriving the temporal foundation in this way, the
party begins to brainwash. In short, deprivation of the
sense of time is an integral technique used by the party
to brainwash people, within or without the Ministry of
Love.
It is in this context that Winston starts to keep a
diary. In a world where the party monopolizes and
tampers the past, writing a personal version of history is
a highly political act. Keeping evidences of the partys
forgery, Winston tries to undermine the foundation of
its rule. Yet, there is also a personal reason for keeping
a diary. Unable to remember his parents, Winston is
desperate to find his origin and understand who he is.
His desire to know the true history is founded on his
aspiration to retrieve his own life history.
2. Nostalgia
Many passages in the novel show Winstons
attachment to the past, and as the story develops,
Winstons desire for the past intensifies. In the first
chapter, Winston writes on his diary DOWN WITH
BIG BROTHER, but after the entrance ritual to the
Brotherhood, he cheers To the past instead of OBriens
suggestion of To the confusion of the Thought Police?
To the death of Big Brother? To humanity? To the
future? (184). His rebellion becomes almost identical
with the search for the past. In this way, the novel is
permeated with the struggle for the past, which functions,
as Howe points out, as an impressive element in the
novel.
Winstons struggle for the past is not immune from
nostalgia. One of the reasons why Winston longs for
the past is that the past age is different from the present.
As his diary is dedicated To the future or to the past,
to a time when thought is free, when men are different
from one another and do not live alone to a time when
truth exists and what is done cannot be undone (30),
Winston refers to the past as an age when there was no
falsifcation of the past and there was truth. In a sense,
his passion for the past can be regarded as a longing for
the Golden Age.
This idealized view of the past is most apparent
in his fascination with Charringtons junk shop in the
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prole district. This shop, where he bought his diary, has
a variety of old curiosities that are worthless in the Big
Brother regime. Winston knows well that possessing
such items is highly dangerous, but the oldness of things,
or the sense of the past, strongly appeals to Winston.
Among various junk, one thing he particularly likes and
purchases is a glass paperweight, which, according to
Charrington, is at least one hundred years old:
It was a heavy lump of glass, curved on one side,
flat on the other, making almost a hemisphere.
There was a peculiar softness, as of rain-water, in
both the colour and the texture of the glass. At the
heart of it, magnified by the curved surface, there
was a strange, pink, convoluted object that recalled
a rose or a sea anemone. (98-99)
The paperweight is a glass hemisphere containing what
looks like a rose or a sea anemone. This unfamiliar
item from the past has an exotic beauty for Winston, yet
the greatest charm for him is the sense of the past the
paperweight evokes: What appealed to him about it was
not so much its beauty as the air it seemed to possess
of belonging to an age quite different from the present
one. (99) In other words, Winston likes the paperweight
simply because it was made in the age when, as he wrote
in his diary, truth exists and what is done cannot be
undone. The sense of the past also comes from the
paperweights form: the hemisphere of glass covers and
protects the rose-like coral, a reminiscence of the past,
and keeps the past intact through the passage of time. In
other words, the paperweight is a symbol of a peaceful
past secluded from a tyrannical power.
Encapsulating the past, the paperweight is a
microcosm of Charringtons shop itself. In particular
the upstairs room of the shop, which Winston rents as
a hiding place, is analogous with the paperweight. The
room is equipped with old-fashioned furniture from the
former age and, as the absence of a telescreen suggests,
it appears to be free from the invading power of Big
Brother. Looking at the room, Winston feels as follows:
[T]he room had awakened in him a sort of nostalgia,
a sort of ancestral memory. It seemed to him that
he knew exactly what it felt like to sit in a room like
this, in an armchair beside an open fire with your
feet in the fender and a kettle on the hob: utterly
alone, utterly secure, with nobody watching you, no
voice pursuing you, no sound except the singing of
the kettle and the friendly ticking of the clock. (100)
Winston thinks the room contains ancestral memory in
the same way as the paperweight holds the past within.
Therefore, for Winston, the room is a kind of museum
where extinct things are kept and displayed: The
room was a world, a pocket of the past where extinct
animals could walk. Mr Charrington, thought Winston,
was another extinct animal (157). If Charrington is
an extinct animal, Winston himself is an endangered
animal looking for sanctuary, as the novel was originally
intended to be titled The Last Man.
Therefore, when Winston rents the room and has a
rendezvous with Julia there, he is symbolically entering
the glass paperweight. The room is a tiny world secluded
from the danger of the outer world, just as the coral is
protected by the glass of the paperweight:
The inexhaustibly interesting thing was not the
fragment of coral but the interior of the glass itself.
There was such a depth of it, and yet it was almost
as transparent as air. It was as though the surface of
the glass had been the arch of the sky, enclosing a
tiny world with its atmosphere complete. He had the
feeling that he could get inside it, and that in fact he
was inside it, along with the mahogany bed and the
gate-leg table, and the clock and the steel engraving
and the paperweight itself. The paperweight was
the room he was in, and the coral was Julias life
and his own, fxed in a sort of eternity at the heart of
the crystal (my italics, 154).
The room provides a sense of timelessness. As the
hemisphere of the enclosing glass protects the past
inside, Winston and Julia, like endangered animals in
a sanctuary, can find refuge in the room surrounded by
furniture of the past age. This image and structure of
the glass paperweight symbolize Winstons nostalgic
attachment to the past.
3. The quest for residual memories
Although it is clear that Winston yearns for the
past, we must still ask what kind of past he is looking
for. Obviously, the past Winston is fascinated by is
completely different from the partys offcial history. In
investigating this point, the metaphor of a palimpsest
is crucial: as cited above, All history was a palimpsest,
scraped clean and re-inscribed exactly as often as was
necessary in the Ingsoc world. Although the metaphor
of a palimpsest primarily refers to the continual revision
of history by the party, it also suggests a survival of
erased memories. As we know, in literary theory a
palimpsest refers to the multiple-layeredness of a text;
even if a text is erased to write anew, the erasure is not
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complete and the previous text is still to some extent
discernible. In other words, despite repeated rewriting,
on a palimpsest one can still see layers of former texts
beneath the latest version. This is true of the palimpsest
metaphor in Nineteen Eighty-Four; Winston is, as it were,
reading a palimpsest for the residue of erased memories,
trying to reconstruct the true history from the fragmented
remains.
Winstons first step towards this goal is to go to a
prole district. He regards proles as a subversive power,
as he wrote in his diary that if there is hope [. . .] it lies
in the proles (72) a statement that recurs throughout
the novel. Proles, the lower-class labourers, constitute
85 per cent of the population of Oceania (72), but not
being party members, they are rather neglected by the
party, while party members are strictly controlled. As
the partys slogan Proles and animals are free (75)
clearly shows, proles are equated with animals. Yet, it
is in their animal-like vitality that Winston fnds a hope
for subversion of the Big Brother regime. Likewise, he
is attracted to Julia who embodies the animal instinct,
the simple undifferentiated desire: that was the force that
would tear the party to pieces (132). For Winston, the
hope lies in the untamed animals rather than the tamed
party members.
When he returns to the prole district, Winstons
idea is that proles might also have subversive memory.
Their area looks like a slum, but in this chaotic aspect
Winston fnds hope: it seems to Winston that the residual
memories are hidden in the promiscuity of the district
with a cobbled street of little two-storey houses with
battered doorways which gave straight on the pavement
and which were somehow curiously suggestive of rat-
holes (86). Thinking that [i]f there was anyone still
alive who could give you a truthful account of conditions
in the early part of the century, it could only be a prole
(90), Winston dares to go into a proles pub, although it is
prohibited for a party member to go to the area. Finding
an old man in the pub, Winston persistently asks him
many questions relating to the past. Although the result
turns out to be disappointing, Winston hopes that he can
fnd true history, intact from the falsifcation of the party,
as Charringtons shop in the district contains the residues
of the past.
In choosing the old prole for the research of
hidden history, Winston is resorting to folkloric power.
With written records systematically falsified, his only
alternative for reclaiming the past is to look for the
residue of memories in the oral narrative of old people.
While the official history is connected with hegemony
and authority, a narrative by a survivor of the former age
is a type of folkloric heritage. The oral history may lack
material evidence, but it has first-hand experience and
emotional genuineness. Because of this, Winston thinks
he might be able to fnd traces of the erased past in oral
history.
This emphasis on the oral narrative reverberates
with Winstons attachment to the nursery rhyme Oranges
and Lemons. As Kawabata argues, the song plays a
very important role in the novel, not only because it
appears frequently in the text, but also because the song
and the way children play with the song prophesize the
eventual catastrophe of Winstons adventure (40-42).
Oranges and Lemons is introduced into the text with
a wide blank in the lyrics; Winston first came to know
the song through a conversation with Charrington, but
Charrington does not tell him the whole lyrics. Winston
is only told the beginning, Orange and lemons, says
the bells of St Clements, and the ending, Here comes
a chopper to chop off your head (102). Attracted to the
rhyme, Winston persistently tries to fill the gap in the
lyrics, as he struggles to fnd the traces of the erased in
history as a palimpsest, aiming at the reconstruction of
the true history.
Winston is fascinated by the song because he thinks
the rhyme has folkloric power with its evocation of the
past orally passed on. Oranges and Lemons is a well-
known example of English oral tradition, but in the world
of Nineteen Eighty-Four it has been reduced to a residue
of the past, which most people have forgotten. That is
why the rhyme is as important as the glass paperweight
for Winston, who believes that the residual is a clue to
the erased past. In fact, the rhyme has strong power to
evoke the past:
It was curious, but when you said it to yourself you
had the illusion of actually hearing bells, the bells of
a lost London that still existed somewhere or other,
disguised and forgotten (my italics, 103)
The song recreates the sound of bells in the mind of
Winston. More importantly, the rhyme suggests the
survival of the erased; the song gives Winston the
impression that the old London is not lost, merely
hiding in a disguised and forgotten form. As history
is a palimpsest where the erased is not entirely lost, the
residue of old London might be found somewhere in the
city as a palimpsest. This is why Winston unconsciously
believes that by discovering the lyrics of Oranges and
Lemons, he will be able to uncover the forgotten history.
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The folkloric is the soil of history where Winston looks
for traces of the erased, while the Party controls the latest
layer of offcial history.
Winstons search for the residual is also oriented
to himself, for residual history is hidden inside his mind
too. First of all, his discontent with the regime derives
from the fact that he cannot forget the former versions
of history. Whereas others appear to be without doubt
regarding the contradictory official statement of the
party, Winston does remember the past to some extent
and detects the contradiction. In other words, Winston
suffers from an incomplete erasure of memory in his
own mind, where traces of the past survive. Moreover,
his inability to forget impels him to look for his origin.
As argued above, being a son of non-persons, Winston
is deprived of an origin. Nevertheless, Winston vaguely
remembers his lost family, especially his mother. This
residue of memory drives him to pursue the part of his
memory that is lost. As Reilly argues, the novel focuses
on a man seeking his true self (116), yet in order to fnd
his true self, Winston needs to fnd the true history. He
is desperate to recover the erased part of his memory like
a palimpsest. In doing so, he is trying to rediscover and
reconstruct his own life history.
In the quest for the residual inside Winstons
memory, dreams are of peculiar importance. As in a
Freudian theory, dreams in Nineteen Eighty-Four convey
Winstons repressed memory. It is through his dream
that the reader can understand that Winstons search for
an origin is concerned with a sense of guilt. One day
Winston has a dream of his mother, which is related
to the reason his mother disappeared: Winston was
dreaming of his mother. [. . .] He could not remember
what had happened, but he knew in his dream that in
some way the lives of his mother and his sister had
been sacrificed to his own (32). The dream shows
that Winston feels guilty for the fact that he is the only
survivor in the family. Also, it is important to note that
he is not certain what actually happened when they
disappeared. His dream evokes his unconscious memory,
but it is very vague like erased letters on a palimpsest.
Therefore, relying on the residual, Winston tries to
retrieve the complete memory of his childhood.
If the dream is a container of the residual, it is not
strange that the dream resembles the glass paperweight.
When Winston has another dream about his mother, it
is narrated using the image of the paperweight. Staying
with Julia in the upstairs room of Charringtons shop, the
dream brings Winston a revelation about his mother:
It was a vast, luminous dream in which his whole
life seemed to stretch out before him like a
landscape on a summer evening after rain. It had
all occurred inside the glass paperweight, but the
surface of the glass was the dome of the sky, and
inside the dome everything was fooded with clear
soft light in which one could see into interminable
distances. The dream had also been comprehended
by indeed, in some sense it had consisted in a
gesture of the arm made by his mother, and made
against thirty years later by the Jewish woman he
had seen on the news film, trying to shelter the
small boy from the bullets, before the helicopters
blew them both to pieces (my italics, 167).
It seems to Winston that the dream, which is an
epitome of his whole life, takes place inside the glass
paperweight. As he can see the inner object through the
arch of the glass constituting a microcosm, his whole
life can be seen at a glance in the realm of the dream.
Winston knows this dream is a residue of his memories
hidden in his unconsciousness, as he thinks [i]t was a
memory that he must have deliberately pushed out of
his consciousness over many years (167-168). Like the
party controlling the official history, Winston himself,
who is not totally immune from the partys brainwashing
techniques, has been monitoring his conscious memory
and repressing part of it; however, the dream reveals the
unconscious residue of his memory.
In the passage above, we should also note that the
gesture of the arm corresponds to the image of the glass
paperweight. The figure of a mother protecting a boy
with her arm recalls the glass hemisphere sheltering the
past inside. Importantly, among various things Winston
saw in his dream, what impressed him most is the gesture
of the arm: The dream was still vivid in his mind,
especially the enveloping, protecting gesture of the arm
in which its whole meaning seemed to be contained
(171). As his whole life is condensed in his dream,
which he feels takes place in the glass hemisphere,
his whole dream is epitomized in the arch of the arm.
Here can be found a mise-en-abme of the symbolical
structure. In the room, which is a macrocosm of the
glass paperweight, he has a dream which corresponds to
the image of the paperweight. Among these overlapping
images, what is common is not only the fact that they
contain the residue of the past, but also the sense of being
protected from the outer threat.
In this mise-en-abme, the residual and the
inviolable inside are intermingled and constitute the
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philosophical basis of Winstons rebellion against the
party. Winstons actions are based on his belief that there
is a sphere which is protected from the invading power
of Big Brother. Just after he had the dream above, the
following conversation with Julia takes place in their
secret room:
Its the one thing they cant do. They can make
you say anything anything but they cant make
you believe it. They cant get inside you.
No, he said a little more hopefully, no: thats
quite true. They cant get inside you. (179).
In a sense, Winston and Julia are fighting to guard the
boundary of their small sphere against the invasion of
the party, and the glass paperweight is the symbol of the
successful protection of the sacred inside.
4. The paradox of conversion
Winstons belief in the inviolable inside, however,
will be turned inside out when he is eventually arrested.
The arrest and subsequent interrogation shatters his
values completely: it is revealed to him that what
appeared to be residual has been under the control of the
party and that the party can get inside Winstons mind
and change his ideas.
In the struggle against Big Brother, Winston
assumed a dichotomy between the written and the oral,
and between the dominant and the residual. As is argued
above, Winston believed that he could access the true
history by resorting to the oral narratives, and that the
true history would defy the falsified official history
of the party. In other words, these distinctions were the
fortifcation for Winston to protect his own sphere.
Yet, when Winston faces his catastrophe, he is
forced to acknowledge that the dichotomy was a mere
illusion. Charrington, who appeared to be an extinct
animal selling old junk, proves to be a member of
Thought Police. OBrien, who taught Winston the full
lyrics of Oranges and Lemons, is not a member of the
Brotherhood, but a faithful member of the Inner Party
whose mission is to discover dissenters. In short, what
Winston thought as the residue of the past the glass
paperweight, the upstairs room of Charringtons shop,
and the nursery rhyme belongs not to Winston, but to
the party. In this way, the sacred inner world is turned
inside out, as the glass paperweight is shattered to pieces
at the arrest:
There was another crash. Someone had picked up
the glass paperweight from the table and smashed it
to pieces on the hearth-stone.
The fragment of coral, a tiny crinkle of pink like
a sugar rosebud from a cake, rolled across the mat
(232).
When the party intrudes into the inside, the illusion of
being sheltered is shattered, and the inner object falls out
and becomes vulnerable to the external world.
If Winstons desire was to find the residue of the
past kept inside, the strategy of the party is to annihilate
the distinction between the inside and the outside. At
Winstons interrogation, OBrien persistently argues that
it is a fallacy that the outer reality is separated from the
inner mind:
You believe that reality is something objective,
external, existing in its own right. [. . .] [Y]ou
assume that everyone else sees the same thing as
you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not
external. Reality exists in the human mind, and
nowhere else (261).
Employing the solipsist logic that [n]othing exists
except through human consciousness (278), OBrien
argues that reality resides not in the external objects
or phenomena but in the mind that interprets them.
That is why brainwashing mechanisms are operated
methodically in the Ingsoc world. By controlling the
minds of individuals, the party controls the reality that is
a refection of the human mind. This view is expressed
most clearly in the following words by OBrien: Reality
is inside the skull (277). Although the image of the
skull containing reality might resemble that of the glass
paperweight, the logic of the party is completely different
from that of Winston. While Winston believed the inner
realm to be separate from the outer world, the party
eradicates the distinction of inside and outside because,
according to OBrien, the inner mind is the outer reality.
In fact, the fundamental strategy of the party is to
deprive individuals inner egos. The omnipresence of
telescreens, which is the most salient surveillance device
in the novel, aims at the annihilation of the inside/outside
distinction. The telescreen might remind the reader of
Foucault argument on the panopticon, a penitentiary
system where prisoners in cells can be watched anytime
by jailers who stay in a central tower. The crux of the
panopticon system is that prisoners cannot know exactly
when they are being watched, although they know jailers
might watch them anytime they like. As a result, in
fear of the jailors eyes, even when they are not being
watched, prisoners behave as if they are being observed;
in other words, they internalize the eyes of the jailors and
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monitor themselves with the eyes. In this regard, people
in the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four are like prisoners
in a panopticon; almost every behaviour or speech might
be spied through numerous telescreens, but surveillance
is intermittent and people are not sure if the Thought
Police are actually watching them or not, as there was
of course no way of knowing whether you were being
watched at any given moment (4). As a result, one has
to live in the assumption that every sound you made
was overheard, and except in darkness, every movement
scrutinised (5). The phrase in the assumption is
signifcant, as it suggests that the eyes of Big Brother are
internalized in the mind. The party plants its eyes inside
the minds of the people, and along with other mind-
control techniques such as doublethink, makes people see
the world not with their own eyes but with the implanted
eyes of the party, as OBrien states: [i]t is impossible
to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the
Party (261). By this means the party invades the inner
selves, annihilating the distinction between the inside
and the outside. After the brainwashing, Winston has to
admit his faith in the inviolability of the inside world has
collapsed: they could get inside you (303).
The control of the human mind results not only
in the rule of reality but also that of history. Since the
past is in itself intangible, people have to rely on written
documents and human memories but, as OBrien argues,
the party controls both (260). Winston knew well that
written documents were monopolized by the party, but he
had a hope that human memories were not entirely under
the partys control. As argued above, it is in human
minds that Winston looked for a true account of the
past; Winston resorted to the oral history of the elderly
prole and the nursery rhyme, where the residual might
be hidden, but his attempts turn out to be fruitless. Thus,
Winston has failed to find his own version of history
against the partys offcial history.
However, the memory of Winston was not totally
controlled by the party. At the root of this reliance on
human memory lies the fact that Winston does remember
what he should not remember. As he still remembers his
family who are supposed not to have existed, his memory
contains the residual. Moreover, the residual memory
comes involuntarily. At the interrogation by OBrien,
forgetting that he is under torture, Winston denies
that memories are involuntary rather than consciously
controlled:
But how can you stop people remembering things?
cried Winston, again momentarily forgetting the
dial. It is involuntary. It is outside oneself. How
can you control memory? You have not controlled
mine! (261)
This involuntary, and therefore uncontrollable, nature
of memory is what brought Winston a hope of finding
the residual history unaltered by the party. As his
dreams reveal the memory buried in the unconscious,
Winston thought the uncontrollability of memories had
a subversive power against the regime of Big Brother.
That is why memories inside human minds were valuable
for Winston.
After the interrogation, however, even this
involuntary memory comes to be controlled by the party.
The party teaches Winston self-discipline, saying
only the disciplined mind can see reality (261). As
reality is a refection of a human mind, the partys eyes
implanted inside the mind of Winston come to monitor
the involuntary memory and control the interpretation of
it. In consequence, the residual memories revealed by
the dream are deprived of subversive power.
As is shown above, Winstons former belief
is shattered after his arrest. The party enters and
invades Winstons microcosm symbolized by the glass
paperweight. It is cruel of the party that they did not
arrest Winston immediately, which they could have done,
as they were monitoring Winston through the telesceen
hidden in the upstairs room of Charringtons shop.
Instead, the party frst gives Winston hopes in the form of
the glass paperweight, the nursery rhyme, and the book
by Goldstein, and lets him pursue those hopes. Then,
after all Winstons struggles, the party utterly shatters
those hopes. In this way, his faith in the inviolability of
the inner self and the existence of the residual is crushed.
What is ironic in the novel is the fact that the
more Winston struggles against the regime, the closer
he comes to catastrophe. This is especially true of the
function of the nursery rhyme in the novel. As Kawabata
points out, Oranges and Lemons is prophetic with the
ending of Here comes a chopper to chop off your head,
suggesting the eventual arrest of Winston (40). While
Winston himself believes he is finding out the whole
lyrics in order to uncover the hidden past, he is, in fact,
realizing the prophecy. In other words, his search for the
past is paving a way for the prophesized future embodied
by the nursery rhyme.
It might be better to interpret this issue as a paradox.
Nineteen Eighty-Four contains various paradoxes, and
the most obvious are the party slogans such as WAR
IS PEACE / FREEDOM IS SLAVERY / IGNORANCE
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IS STRENGTH (6). More importantly, the novel itself
is highly paradoxical. Although set in the future, the
world Orwell describes in the novel refects the political
situation of his time, whether totalitarian Stalinism in
Russia or socialism in Britain

What is curious in this


futuristic novel refecting the present is that it features the
struggle for the retrieval of the past. In short, Nineteen
Eighty-Four is paradoxical in terms of temporality.
Therefore, the function of the nursery rhyme, which
works as both a key to the past and a prophecy of
the future, can be regarded as another example of the
contradiction of temporal vectors in the novel.
This paradox brings a slightly bright aspect in the
novel. The novel appears to be thoroughly pessimistic,
ending with the crushing of Winstons hopes, as he
realizes that there is neither anything inviolable inside
nor is the residual memory immune from the influence
of the party. Paradoxically, however, we can still
find rays of hope in the pessimistic conversion. For
example, although Winstons reliance on the folkloric
is subverted, we can also see a product by the party
escape from the partys control. Whereas the nursery
rhyme Oranges and Lemons turns out to be a trap set
by the party, the song mechanically composed by the
party comes to acquire folkloric power. Focusing on a
washerwoman who sings the song in the neighbourhood
of Charringtons shop, Kawabata suggests that a
washerwoman is a typical figure in nursery rhymes.
Therefore, although the song is mechanically produced
by the party, the way she sings it is very folkloric. Thus,
according to Kawabata, the woman is usurping the
partys song into the realm of folklore. In short, the
function of the folkloric in the novel is twofold: on the
one hand, it is exploited by the party; on the other hand,
the mechanical product is transformed into the folkloric.
In this way, the conversion is not totally pessimistic, even
if it appears to be.
This paradox can also be found in terms of the
residual memory. Interestingly enough, Winston can
retrieve his lost memory after he submits to the party.
After being released from the Ministry of Love, the
brainwashed Winston can now deal with the involuntary
memory with the partys reality-control technique. One
day a memory comes involuntarily to his mind:
Unrecalled, a memory floated into his mind. He
saw a candlelit room with a vast white-counterpaned
bed, and himself, a boy of nine or ten, sitting on the
floor, shaking a dice-box and laughing excitedly.
His mother was sitting opposite him and also
laughing.
I t mus t have been a mont h bef or e s he
disappeared. It was a moment of reconciliation, [ .
. .] For a whole afternoon they had all been happy
together, as in his earlier childhood.
He pushed the picture out of his mind. It was a
false memory. He was troubled by false memories
occasionally. They did not matter so long as one
knew them for what they were (my italics, 308-
309).
As a party member, who is supposed to see and interpret
the world through the eyes of the party, he controls the
interpretation of the memory; he regards the revelation
as a false memory and dismisses it. The paradox here,
however, is that the detailed memory comes back after
he is brainwashed. Before the brainwashing Winston
was desperate to recall the memory of his childhood but
could not do so for all his struggle; in contrast, after he is
brainwashed the memory comes back with clarity.
What is more, the unrecalled memory recalls the
glass paperweight. The scene Winston remembers
clearly is of his family staying indoors on a rainy day:
He remembered the day well, a pelting, drenching day
when the water streamed down the window-pane and
the light indoors was too dull to read by (309). As the
paperweight consists of soft, rain-water glass (99),
Winston and his family in the memory are sheltered
by the rain-drenched window-pane. Even after the
paperweight is shattered and Winston comes to dismiss
the involuntary memory as false, the image of the glass
paperweight reverberates and brings back the clear
memory of his childhood which he has been longing
for. In this way, Winstons mind-control paradoxically
revives the memory of happy days which the glass
paperweight embodies.
These are slightly bright aspects in the pessimism
of the novel. It is true that the values Winston held
onto throughout his struggle against the party are totally
reversed by the party, but the reversal is not entirely in
favour of the party. As the song mechanically produced
by the party transforms into the folkloric, Winstons
aspiration to regain the memory of his childhood
is fulfilled in his brainwashing. Paradoxically, his
submission to the party allows him to reclaim his
memory. Therefore, in this novel, the reversal of
values is not unidirectional; as rebellion is reversed to
obedience, the obedience has the potential to revolve into
a subversive power.
It is important to emphasize that the novel is not
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only about paradoxes, rather the novel is itself a paradox.
In Brins words, the novel is a self-preventing prophecy
anticipating the frightening future, which in turn warns
people not to realize the future. In other words, as Reilly
points out, Orwell wishes his readers to act outside and
before the text (123) against the forthcoming totalitarian
future. Therefore, although inside the text Orwell
describes the failure of resistance to the totalitarian
power, outside the text he is wishing for success. In this
respect, it can be said that Orwell himself is assuming a
distinction between the inside and the outside, which is
shattered inside the text. These paradoxes bring a ray of
hope, although very thin, in the darkness of the satire.
5. Conclusion
Nineteen Eighty-Four describes the struggle of
Winston Smith for the retrieval of a past which is
monopolized by the party. Deprived of the memory
of his childhood, Winston suffers from the lack of his
own life history, which leads to an uncertainty of his
identity. In order to fill the void of his life history, he
tries to reclaim the past by looking for residues of the
past that the party failed to erase. The ideal of Winston
is symbolically embodied in the glass paperweight,
which shelters the residue of the past in its transparent
hemisphere. In fact, Winstons rebellion is founded
on his belief in the survival of the residual and the
inviolability of the inside. However, as the partys
slogans are formulated by the reversal of the opposites
such as FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, Winstons belief
is reversed as the story develops. What appeared to
be residual memory turns out to be a trap the party has
set, and the party invades the apparently sheltered inner
microcosm. Eventually, his struggle for freedom ends
with conversion to slavery.
In this sense, the novel appears to be pessimistic,
but there is still hope. Hope emerges from the fact
that the reversal of values is not one-way in the novel:
while a nursery rhyme is exploited by the party, a song
mechanically produced by the party acquires folkloric
power; and the memory of his family, which he could not
retrieve despite his struggle, comes back to him after the
brainwashing. As Nineteen Eighty-Four is a paradox of
a self-preventing prophecy, the pessimism in the novel
is not straightforward but has to be understood in terms
of paradox.

For this function of narrative, see Bruner and Brooks.

As for the features of the torture itself in the novel, Rejali analyses them referring to historical contexts.

For example, Conquest states that many points in the novel correspond to Stalins regime. On the other hand, Crick argues that the novel
is a parody of the thesis of James Burnham, an American political theorist. According to Gleason, besides the political situation, Orwells
biological elements are embodied in the pessimism of the novel.
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Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and
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Bruner, Jerome. Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life.
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Campbell, Beatrix. Orwell paterfamilias or Big
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